“Been in my pocket the entire time.”
“You traitor.”
“Worse,” Sam says. “I’m the alien.”
James narrows his eyes. “I knew it.”
I gasp as James throws himself onto Sam, pulling down the fort with him. The sheets fall over me, covering my face, and then rise again in the air before they shift and fall into flakes of snow as the scene changes around me.
I am sitting in Sam’s car with my door open. We are parked across the street from the Reed College campus. The ground is covered with leaves and a thin layer of snow. Sam opens his door and walks around to my side of the car. He squats down to look at me, and offers a hand.
“Come on, Julie. Let’s check it out,” he says. “We drove all the way here.”
“I said we don’t need to. It’s already starting to snow. We should go.”
“I’d hardly call this snow,” Sam says.
“Let’s just go, Sam,” I say again, and face the front of the car, ready to leave.
“I thought you wanted to look around the campus? I mean, isn’t that why we drove four hours?”
“I only wanted to get a sense of the place. And I got it.”
“From the seat of my car?” He rests a hand on the roof, and looks down. “I don’t get it. You were so excited when you planned this. Now you want to leave already.”
“It’s nothing. I want to check out downtown before everything closes. Let’s go,” I say.
“Julie…” Sam says. He gives me the look that means he knows me too well. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
I cross my arms and sigh. “I don’t know. What if I hate it? It already doesn’t look like anything from the pictures. I’m underwhelmed.”
“But you haven’t even seen all of it yet.”
“What if it’s worse?” I point out at a redbrick building that resembles a barn near an empty field. “Look, that’s straight out of Ellensburg.”
“You’re not giving your dream school a fair shot, Jules,” Sam says. He stands and glances around at the people walking by. “Don’t you want to at least talk to some students? Ask them questions about what it’s like here, about the social life and stuff?”
“Not really,” I say. “What if they’re all a bunch of rich elite snobs who keep asking me what my parents do for a living?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
I take a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t know, Sam … There’s this air about the city that’s—what’s the word?” I pause to think. “Pretentious.”
“I thought you liked pretentious,” Sam says.
I give him a look.
“Kidding.” He smiles. “So now you don’t like Portland at all, I see.”
“Overrated. As far as I can tell.”
Sam sighs, and then squats down to my level again. His voice softens. “You’re scared about leaving your mom, aren’t you?” he says.
“I don’t want her to be alone,” I say. “My dad already left, so maybe I should take a year or two off and work at the bookstore. Mr. Lee said he’d promote me to an assistant manager.”
“Is that what your mom would want?” Sam asks.
I don’t say anything.
“Is that what you want?”
Nothing from me.
“She’s gonna be fine, Jules,” Sam says. “Okay? You can’t name a more independent person. I mean, your mom teaches a class called Distorting Time. She literally does Pilates in other dimensions.”
“I know,” I say.
Sam takes my hand and our fingers lace. “Portland’s gonna be great,” he promises. “We’ll find a cool little apartment downtown … fix it up … look for coffee shops where I can play music and you can sit and write … it’ll be like we planned.”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s see what this campus is all about,” he says.
“We really don’t have to,” I say. “I’m fine with what I see from the car. Really.”
“Fine.” He sighs. “Then I’ll drive the car onto the quad.” He pulls out his keys and stands.
“What? Sam—”
It’s something he would absolutely do. I grab him before he steps around the car. “Okay—I’ll go.”
Sam smiles as he takes both my hands and helps me out of the car as fog begins to rise around us. I follow Sam into it like walking through a wall of smoke, as strobe lights flash all around me and music begins to blare, growing louder until I realize I’ve gone somewhere else.